Posts relating to the security of information: usually in digital form. If the term “cyber-security” ever appears, it refers strictly to the subset of “information security” that protects against attacks across networks
The recent invention of the phrase “Bring Your Own Device” seems to have got educational organisations agonising about something we’ve been doing routinely, indeed relying on, for at least 15 years. Whenever you send a member of staff home with some work to do but no laptop to do it on, or provide a webmail […]
Many of the talks at the FIRST conference consider activities within and between incident response teams, but two talks today considered how CSIRTs and boards can work better together. Pete O’Dell suggested that many company boards either delegate or ignore information security, perhaps considering that it is “just another risk”. He suggested that information security […]
A strong common (and unplanned, honest!) theme emerged from the information security session at Networkshop yesterday: that information security, or information risk, is ultimately the responsibility of individual users. Only they can decide which documents it is safe to read on a train, which phone calls they can make in a public place. The role […]
I’ve had several conversations this week that related to what’s commonly referred to as “level of assurance”: how confident we can be that an account or other information about an on-line user actually relates to the person currently sitting at the keyboard. Governments may be concerned with multiple forms of documentary proof but I suspect […]
I reckon the education sector accepted user-owned devices (now known as Bring Your Own Device) at least fifteen years ago, the moment we provided remote access and encouraged staff and students to work outside the office. My talk at the Janet/Jisc services day in London therefore looked at how we can do it better, suggesting […]
Most portable devices – laptops, smartphones and memory sticks – should be encrypted so that the information they contain is protected if the device is lost or stolen. Many countries (including the UK) give their immigration and other authorities legal powers to demand that you decrypt an encrypted device though given the number of laptops […]
Presenting at the Jisc’s Safer Internet Day event got me thinking a bit more about the shared interests between owners and organisations in a BYOD scheme, and the opportunity that might present. For many years I’ve liked the idea of helping users be safe in their personal Internet lives (where motivation should be a matter […]
I’ve had a few discussions recently where people talked about the ‘new risk’ of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), but then mentioned risks – loss/theft of device, use in public place, etc. – that already exist on organisation-managed mobile devices. Turning that around, it struck me that one way to develop a BYOD policy might […]
The UCISA Networking Group’s conference BYOD: Responding to the Challenge looked at new developments in an area that has actually been an important part of Higher Education for at least fifteen years. Student residences have offered network sockets since the 1990s and staff have been using family PCs for out of hours work for at […]
The Information Commissioner has published helpful new guidance on how organisations can support the use of personally-owned devices for work, commonly known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). This appears to have been prompted by a survey suggesting that nearly half of employees use their own devices for work, but more than two thirds of […]